by Tom Holt
On another level, it suggested that his new gadget wasn’t nearly as good as he’d thought it was. He conceded a certain degree of disappointment. It was the free-with-this-issue radio alarm clock that stops working after twenty-four hours; worth exactly what he’d paid for it. Natural justice.
That’s the thing about natural justice. It may be just, but it’s seldom fair. Nature’s approach to deciding which child should have the disputed toy is to break the toy.
(And then he thought, Just look at yourself, will you? Probably the most important discovery in human history, and you’re grousing because maybe it doesn’t do everything you were led to believe it could do by your recollections of My First Book of Fairy Tales. That’s on a par with Archimedes vaulting out of the bath yelling, “Oh shit, I’ve spilt water all over the floor.”)
Order, order. He pulled himself together and took stock. First, and arguably most important, he’d got Polly’s dress back for her. Job done. Second, in the process of doing the first, he’d discovered that magic existed – well, that’s interesting, dear, as his mother would say – and that (possibly because he was the current owner of a stupid brass pencil sharpener) he could do magic, sort of, a bit; he could break desks and then mend them again, he could retrieve lost garments, he could get money out of the bank without having to walk to the corner of the street and use the ATM. Useful accomplishments, all of them. Even so. Right now, if offered a choice between magic and a Black & Decker Workmate, with usefulness the main criterion, it’d have to be the Workmate. No contest.
So, what was he going to do about it?
He went into the living room, sat down in his fat, slightly broken, comfortable chair, closed his eyes and tried to think. He chased thoughts up and down and round and round, holed them up in corners, waited for them to poke their noses out and pounced on them, until eventually he understood what the question really was.
Namely; do I want to get involved?
Find the question and seven times out of ten you realise you already know the answer. No, he thought, I don’t. In fact, it’s the last thing on earth I want. Even if it meant I could save the rainforests, find a practical alternative to fossil fuels and make the perfect omelette. Some gadgets come at too high a price, and I don’t need that kind of aggravation; there’s nothing I want badly enough. Which probably means (he realised with considerable surprise) I’m perfectly contented and happy with my life. Gosh. Fancy that.
Somebody was clouting his door; by the sound of it, with a clenched fist. That must be Polly. Everybody else rang the bell, but she maintained (and he had no reason to doubt her word) that she couldn’t get it to work. Just press the button, he kept telling her. I did, she’d reply, and nothing happened.
“Well?” she said.
“Hello, come in,” he replied.
She pushed past him. “Did you get it?”
“What are you doing here? It’s only ten past four. You should still be—”
“I couldn’t wait. Pretended I had toothache. Did you get it?”
He nodded. “Remember to talk funny when you get back, like your mouth’s still frozen.”
“Did you—?”
“Yes.” He led her into the living room and pointed. “There,” he said. “Is that it?”
She was clawing at the plastic. Why can’t women unwrap things in an orderly fashion? “Yes,” she said. “So you found the place all right?”
Was it George Washington who couldn’t tell a lie, or was he thinking of Mr Spock? Either way, he felt sorry for him. “No bother,” he said.
“They’d moved.”
A statement, not a question. It’d have been rude to contradict her. “That’s right,” he said.
She was holding the dress up, examining it. “I thought that had to be it,” she said. “After all, a shop doesn’t just vanish into thin air.”
She sounded happy. Well, maybe not positive-happy, but free from anxiety and stress. “I’d better be getting back to the office,” she said; then, on the doorstep, very much the afterthought, “Thanks.”
And then she was gone. “No problem,” he said to the gap where she’d been.
CHAPTER FOUR
He woke up, yawned, reached out blind for the alarm clock, flipped the off button and lay still for a moment, enjoying the absence of that horrible shrill buzzing noise. Another day, apparently.
Next to him, his wife snarled, grabbed a fistful of duvet and dragged it towards her, like a wolf ripping apart a carcass. Sweetest woman in the world when awake, thirty years of marriage and never a cross word; asleep, a ravening monster. Carefully, like a man carrying a flask of nitroglycerine across a minefield past a hundred sleeping lions, he swung his legs out of bed, snuggled his feet into his slippers and crossed the landing to the kitchen.
Start every day with a nice cup of tea. While the kettle boiled he cut four precise slices off the loaf, put two in the toaster, opened the cupboard and took out a jar of marmalade and a packet of muesli. Milk from the fridge, a knife for spreading butter, two bowls, two spoons. The curtains were drawn in the kitchen. He left them that way.
Tea made, stirred; toast buttered and marmaladed; muesli milk-soaked; the entire assembly on a tray. He tiptoed into the bedroom, took a deep breath, then cooed, “Morning, dear.”
Snarl. Grendel’s mother. He put the tea within arm’s reach of where she lay, smothered in snatched duvet like a dragon on its hoard, and deposited the tray on her dressing table. Then he went back into the kitchen and ate his breakfast.
Oh well, he thought, as he finished his second slice of toast. Better get it over with.
He stood up, crossed to the window and pinched the corner of the curtain between forefinger and thumb. Some days he tweaked it back, just a little corner, and peeped through. Other days he yanked it aside, like pulling off a plaster. Today he closed his eyes and drew those curtains slowly and steadily. Variations, small ways of coping with the horror bit by bit. He opened his eyes and looked out.
She must have heard the curtain moving on its rail. “Where are we?” she called out, voice still fuzzy with sleep.
He paused before answering. “It’s raining,” he said. “Narrow street, old-fashioned, cobbles.”
“Salford?”
“Could be.” Personally, he thought probably a bit further south – Leicester, maybe, or Nottingham. He’d learned a hell of a lot about regional styles of domestic architecture over the past few years. “Nowhere we’ve been before,” he added.
“Look on the satnav,” she told him irritably, like she always did.
The satnav had been a godsend; it saved the embarrassment of wandering out into the street in your dressing gown and slippers, stopping a passer-by and asking, “Where is this?” The satnav just knew, as soon as you switched it on. Just like magic, she’d said, when they first got it. He didn’t agree. The satnav was helpful, reliable, useful and safe. Not like magic at all.
He switched it on, then did the dishes while he waited for it to warm up. When eventually the little map appeared, he did the zoom-out thing and found that they were in Derby.
“Derby,” she repeated. “My sister Annie’s husband came from Derby. You remember him. Jim. Big bloke, bald head, moustache.”
He didn’t. She had five sisters, all of whom had married men he couldn’t stand. Fortunately, the chances of Annie and Jim coming into the shop while they were there didn’t seem to be all that great. Indeed, one of the few good things about his life, ever since It happened, was that he hadn’t had to meet or be civil to any of her relatives. Or his own, come to that. Silver lining, he thought, and took another look out of the window.
He washed his face, shaved, combed his hair, got dressed. Eight o’clock, time to start getting ready for the working day. He was missing something.
“Eileen,” he called out, “have you seen my blue cardigan?”
“It’s in the wash,” she called back. “Wear your fawn one.”
He went downstairs, unlocked the
connecting door and walked into the shop. To his left, the machines, to his right the counter, the racks where the cleaned and pressed clothes were hung up, and the door to the street. He drew back the bolts, unlocked the door and looked out. He quite liked the smell of rain on pavement, but it made the newspaper soggy. He picked it up, along with the milk, and closed the door.
So many mysteries connected with It, but the one which puzzled him most of all was how the paper boy and the milkman managed to find them. And they did. No matter where the shop pitched up, from Stornaway to Truro, every morning when he opened the front door, there were two pints of semi-skimmed and the Daily Express, regular as clockwork. True, he felt a bit bad about the fact that they never knew where the papers or the milk came from, so they hadn’t paid for either commodity ever since It started. On the other hand, the more ruthless side of his nature argued, if we’ve got to put up with It, we’re entitled to a few perks. Milk and a paper’s the least they can do, whoever they may be.
It. He had no other way of describing what had happened, what had been happening, to his wife and himself for the past… he couldn’t actually remember any more – a very long time, at any rate. Once upon a time they’d run a nice little dry-cleaning business in a pleasant part of west London. One morning they’d woken up to find that they’d moved – to Norwich, as it happened. The shop had uprooted itself, travelled halfway across the country while he and his wife slept, and snuggled itself into a small row of shops in the southern suburbs of the city.
That had been a bad day. Phone calls: they’d tried ringing the police, the fire brigade, the city and county councils, the BBC, the seismology departments of the major universities, but either the lines were engaged or they were asked to hold, and, twenty minutes of Vivaldi or Beatles-arranged-for-string-quartet later, a click and a buzz… Meanwhile, people had been hammering on the door, with their coats and trousers and pure-wool skirts. Explain to them, they wouldn’t listen, didn’t seem to hear; it was as though the words that reached their ears were completely different – ordinary, to do with the business of laundering clothes. Leaving the shop proved impossible; they’d get as far as the door and another customer would come bustling in with another rush job – Do you think you could possibly have it done by five thirty? I’m going to my best friend’s hen night – and by the time they’d got rid of her, another one was there in the doorway. At 6 p.m. they closed the door and shot the bolts, then collapsed in the tiny downstairs kitchen.
“Put the kettle on,” she’d said.
And that was that, the last time they’d even tried to discuss It, except tangentially, in passing. No need. By then both of them understood. Whatever It was, It was bigger and stronger and cleverer than they were. Trying to outrun or outsmart It could only end in tears. The sensible thing (the only course of action open to them) was to burrow their heads as comfortably as possible into the nice warm sand and wait for It to stop. With any luck, they didn’t say to each other, tomorrow morning…
Which came, alarm-ushered and rainswept, and there they still were, in Norwich, with no explanations and a shopful of cleaning, pressing, mending and ironing to get done. And they thought (no need for words when you’ve been married as long as they had), Well, we might as well get on with it. It’s what we do all day, caring for other people’s clothes. The only thing that’s changed is the view out of the windows, and there’s precious little time for window-gazing when you’re in business for yourself. People, real people, as far as they could tell, were relying on them, and they paid in real money. Business as usual – just like the war, in fact.
Working furiously, they got everything done, handed back and paid for by six; after which they were too tired to do anything more strenuous than cook a couple of ready meals out of the freezer and go to bed. Next morning, they found themselves in Portsmouth.
And so it went on. The rules, it turned out, were fairly simple. Never more than forty-eight hours in one place. The freezer restocked itself at some point during the night – such a saving on the grocery bills; ditto the water, the gas and the electric, which they got for free; ditto the consumable supplies they needed for the business. Once the takings in the till (including cheques) went over a thousand pounds, it all vanished, apart from a generous float. Once a month they got a bank statement, addressed to them at wherever they happened to be that day. It was mounting up very nicely indeed, partly because they never spent any of it, because they never had time to nip out to the bank and withdraw anything. As and when It stopped, there’d be enough there for a very comfortable retirement (Portugal, Florida even); meanwhile, they worked hard all day, as they’d always done, and tried not to think about anything longer term or further away than they could help. It meant they’d completely lost touch with their families and their old friends (when they thought about it, they were pleasantly stunned by how little they missed them); on the other hand, each of them was prepared to swear blind that the other hadn’t aged a day since It started. They had their work, and they had each other. No weekends, apparently – go to bed on Friday night, wake up on Monday morning – but they never felt more than comfortably tired, and neither of them had had as much as a cold or a sore throat since they first landed in Norwich. His view (he’d never asked his wife for her opinion) was that whoever was doing It was pretty damn smart: he gave them just enough perks to make them turn a blind eye to the rest of it – the weird stuff, the endless work, the unvarying routine. In all the time It had been going on, they’d never once tried to escape, or made any serious effort to find out what was going on, or even to tell anybody about It. Could be worse, they both felt, and it’s bound to stop of its own accord sooner or later. Just let It run its course.
The longer It went on, in fact, the less they wanted it to stop. The world outside had changed since they were first isolated from it. If the Daily Express was to be believed (as far as they were concerned, it was), the outside world was a horrible scary place, where you were lucky if you got through the day without being blown up by terrorists or stabbed by youths or poisoned by your food or laid low by some appalling new disease. They’d had a car back in west London, but they wouldn’t be able to afford to run it now, and weren’t gas and electric a terrible price? They really didn’t know how people managed. Safe inside the world of It, life was better in so many little ways. For example, they were still getting 1987’s television. The programme listings in the paper didn’t sound nearly as good: all these makeover shows and talent shows and reality shows, when what they enjoyed was a nice comedy, or a serial. Also, both of them had secretly always fancied travelling – not abroad, just seeing a bit more of this country – but neither of them could abide the fuss and bother of holidays. Thanks to It, they’d been to every settlement in the United Kingdom bigger than a village, and all without having to leave the comfort of their home.
Even so.
But he didn’t think about that. Mostly, when he thought outside his box at all, he wondered what happened to the stuff that wasn’t collected before they moved on. It stayed on the rack for a day, and then it wasn’t there any more. He hoped very much that it somehow found its way back to its owners, and didn’t get too badly creased in the process. They got paid for it, at any rate.
He’d begun to wonder when they watched a thing on TV about the legend of the Flying Dutchman, which he’d wanted to see under the impression that it’d be about steam trains. Not so, apparently. The Flying Dutchman was some poor sod of a sea captain who was cursed by the Devil on account of some trivial infringement of the rules, and who spent all eternity wandering the seven seas in an old ship. It had made him think. Had he done something wrong? Short-changed a customer; lost someone’s favourite blouse; shrunk someone’s trousers? As far as he knew his conscience was clear, but you never know, do you? There were days when he worried a lot about that, until he remembered the perks. If he was being punished for something, would It pay all his bills and arrange for the milk and the papers? On balance, he though
t not. So that was all right.
And that was all, really (apart from that other business): an unconventional life that didn’t really suit but not without its benefits. You just had to shrug your shoulders, play the hand you’d been dealt, keep your head down and your nose clean and get on with it, and never under any circumstances whatsoever use the downstairs toilet between ten fifteen and a quarter to twelve. There were, as he often remarked to his wife, a heck of a lot of people worse off than they were. Look at all those earthquakes in the Middle East or wherever, and the wars, and global whatsit and the council tax.
He opened the paper at random and scanned it for a story he could relate to. Not so easy this morning, since he couldn’t get Celebrity Big Brother on their telly, he’d never done the lottery and he’d stopped following football years ago. Property prices, he smiled at those. In the staying-put world house prices were through the roof one moment and down the toilet the next. Another thing they didn’t have to worry about. According to their bank statement, It had paid off their mortgage, and the business loan too. The bit in the paper said that people who couldn’t afford to buy a conventional house were turning to mobile homes as a more affordable option. Well, quite.
In the business section there was a profile of some bloke called Huos who ran a development company, Blue Remembered Hills. There was a photo, and it rang a bell. I know that face, he thought. He had a remarkable memory for faces – not a particularly relevant asset, the way things were these days – and he was positive he’d seen that man before.
“Him?” She peered at the picture over the top of her glasses. Another of It’s more welcome side effects; she didn’t need glasses to read any more, though she couldn’t get out of the habit of putting them on. “Oh yes, I remember him. Wasn’t he—”
The shop bell rang. A nervous, harassed-looking man with a shirt. There were, they noticed, lipstick marks on the collar. “My wife’s back from her mother’s tonight,” he explained, “and I don’t know how to use the washing machine.”